(5) The Author’s Methodology in His Book
The following are some of the salient features of his approach:

– He fashioned the work with meticulous coherence, grounding it in the two pure springs: the Quran and the sunnah. He devoted his entire life to championing them and inviting others to them. Listen to his words (p. 269): “When the foundation is one, the desired goal is one, and the path taken is one, scarcely will disagreement arise; and if it does, it is a kind that causes no harm, just as the differences among the Companions caused no harm. The foundation upon which they built is one: the Book of Allah and the sunnah of His Messenger. The aim is one: obedience to Allah and His Messenger. The path is one: examining the proofs of the Quran and the sunnah and giving them precedence over every statement, opinion, analogy, intuition, or policy.”

As for the Quran, he could summon its verses whenever he needed them, as though they were arrayed before his very eyes. The book is saturated with clear, decisive passages, accompanied by his reflective contemplation of their meanings and his mastery of tafsir and its sciences; see the index of verses and the index of exegesis.

Regarding the sunnah, Ibn al-Qayyim was a foremost ḥāfiẓ (master memorizer of hadith). To appreciate the lofty level of his memorization and understanding, one need only consider the testimony of his own teacher, the ḥāfiẓ of the age, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Mizzī. Al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Muḥibb relates: “I said in the presence of our shaykh al-Mizzī, ‘Ibn al-Qayyim is on a par with Ibn Khuzaymah.’ He replied, ‘In this era he is as Ibn Khuzaymah was in his.’” (1) His prodigious memory is evident in his ready recollection of hadiths whenever he needs them, his habit of attributing most narrations to their sources in the books of sunnah, his consistent preservation of the exact wording of the reports, and his careful selection